The Blasphemer: A Novel (8 page)

‘Yes.’

‘Go on then.’

‘Because if it was green you wouldn’t know where the sky ended and the land began.’

Daniel cracked his knuckles. The back of his neck was feeling prickly. He rubbed it, trying to stifle another yawn. ‘It’s because light arriving from the sun hits the molecules in the air and is scattered in all directions.’ He knew he was talking too crisply, too quickly; trying to disguise his tension.

Nancy continued her own train of thought. ‘Of course, where the blue of the sky meets the blue of the sea, there you have a problem …’

‘The amount of scattering depends on the frequency,’ Daniel added. ‘Blue light has a high frequency and is scattered ten times more than red light which has …’ He swallowed. ‘Which has a lower frequency.’ He yawned again and stretched involuntarily. ‘So the background scattered light you see in the sky is blue.’ His mouth was dry; heart stuttering. He wiped the window again. Closed the blind.

‘Do you know why the army term for a friendly fire incident is “a blue-on-blue”?’ Nancy asked.

Daniel frowned. He knew this one. ‘Is it because …’ He shook his head. ‘No, I don’t.’

Nancy grinned triumphantly. ‘It refers to the colour used to mark friendly troops on maps.’

A hissing sound came from the back of the plane. The passengers turned as one in their seats to see what it was. Then it happened: a dull explosion; a violent jolt; a gut-wrenching plummet. It was so sudden no one screamed. The dive lasted for several hundred feet before the plane levelled off. Nancy grasped for a handhold. ‘
Jesus
.’ It sounded like she was in a wind tunnel. ‘Dan? What’s happening? Was that an air pocket?
What’s happening?
’

An angry metallic sound came from the right side of the plane; the sound of metal ripping. This was followed by a popping noise in the fuselage below, like bubble wrap being burst. The plane banked left. People were screaming now. The flight attendant, who had been thrown the length of the plane, tried to stand up, grabbing a trolley to steady himself. He had a small gash on his head. For the next thirty seconds the plane pitched and rolled and there was a sickening series of thuds, like hammer blows against an anvil. The
air tightened. The temperature in the cabin dropped – a chill of terror passing through the plane.

Daniel flicked his blind up. Five feet out on the wing the engine spluttered and stopped. It was missing a blade. Another blade was bent at a ninety-degree angle. The cowling was mangled, its aluminium peeled back and twisted, its wires and cables whipping in the airstream. Fuel was spewing from steel-braided hoses. With fumbling hands, Daniel reached for a sick bag from the seat pocket, but didn’t manage to open it in time. The vomit splashed over his knees and shins and on to what Nancy always called his ‘scientist’s sandals’.

The left engine sounded louder on its own – so loud Daniel thought he had gone deaf in his right ear. Partial deafness. An image of his father’s face flashed into his head for a second before his attention focused on the door to the cockpit. It was swinging open and closed and he could hear shouted snatches of the pilot’s broken English: ‘G362ES. G362ES.’ Next came some co-ordinates followed by the word ‘north’, and some more followed by ‘east’. The pilot shouted: ‘We out at two zero zero at this time. Angels twenty. We losing power. We attempt emergency landing. Ecuador Centre. G362ES declaring an emergency. We have engine failure. Repeat.
We have engine failure
.’

The plane was gliding in a wide, downward spiral. The engine was no longer loud. A whistle of rushing air could be heard. The screams had turned to whimpers. Behind them, Susie was muttering: ‘
Ohmygod, ohmygod, ohmygod
.’ Towards the back of the plane someone was praying in Spanish. Daniel turned round. An elderly woman was fingering a string of rosary beads. She didn’t notice that she had a nosebleed. Incongruously, Greg was holding his Handycam up to his eye again, filming the scenes of panic. There was a powerful smell of aviation fuel and vomit. Oxygen masks flopped down from the overhead lockers. Daniel stared dumbly at his. We must be below 10,000 feet by now, he calculated with shock-induced detachment, because I am still conscious. With a rapid decompression you have only twenty seconds to get your oxygen mask on; after that you lose the ability to think clearly or
co-ordinate properly. And after that a feeling of euphoria comes over you, a symptom of the brain not getting enough oxygen.
We are definitely below 10,000 feet. Because I am definitely not feeling euphoric
.

The flight attendant held a paper napkin to his head and made a surprisingly calm announcement over the Tannoy.’ You may notice, lady and gentlemen, we are experience some difficulty. But do not try to panic. We get through this together. This a twin turboprop. It can fly on one engine.’ He began reading from his card. ‘ “In the unlikely event of a landing on water, you find you life vest under seat. Please remove pen and other sharp object …” ’ Daniel could not concentrate. His mind had latched on to the words:
We get through this together.

Nancy felt under her seat for her life vest. Daniel did the same. When they had put them on, they looked at each other for the first time since the explosion. Nancy’s velvet-brown eyes were wide with confusion and fear, her pupils dilated. They kissed clumsily, their lips dry. ‘I love you,’ she said. Her eyes were beginning to water.

‘I love you,’ Daniel echoed, taking her hand, his voice sounding distant to him, disembodied. He looked at Nancy’s tear-rimmed eyes. When wet they looked like melting chocolate. He wanted to reassure her, tell her any lie that would stop her looking so frightened. ‘It’s going to be OK, Nance. It’s going to be OK. This is a seaplane. We’re supposed to land on water. We’ll be fine. We’ll be …’ He stopped. They both knew they weren’t going to be fine.

Nancy gripped his hand. Her knuckles were white. ‘Be brave, Dan,’ she said. ‘I love you.’ Heavy tears were hanging on her lashes. She closed her eyes and repeated. ‘I love you. I love you …
Martha!
I’ve got to ring her.’ She felt for her mobile in her shoulder bag, turned it on and looked at its screen. ‘No signal.
Come on. Come on
. There.’ She pressed a speed-dial button and held the phone to her ear. ‘Come on. Come on. Please pick up.
Please. Please
. Hello? … It’s gone to voicemail … It’s me, darling. I love you.’ She sobbed and passed the phone to Daniel.

‘I love you, baby. I love you. Be a good girl. Be a brave girl. Mummy and Daddy love you.’

They were the only words he could think to say, the only ones that could be said.

He thought about their life insurance, the wills they had made, how they had named his parents as Martha’s guardians. Martha would be looked after. The baby would be looked after. Grampy and Grumpy would look after her. Daniel thought, too, of the second drawer of his desk, the one that was locked, the one that contained Nancy’s Rampant Rabbit, the ecstasy pills he brought home from Glastonbury but never got round to taking, their stash of grass wrapped in clingfilm. Martha would find them all one day.

‘We gonna be OK? We gonna be OK?’ The tall, black man was shouting this to the flight attendant. The question brought Daniel back to the horror of the present tense. The plane was listing and it made him feel disorientated, as though delivered from gravity. He looked out at the wing but there were no visual references, no horizon, just lonely, cloudless sky.

They were floating rather than falling now. Daniel retched again. The fear had penetrated deep into his gut and was making his hands tremble uncontrollably. He stared at them as if they were not his own. From behind came the sound of Susie being sick, too. There was a jarring sensation as the plane banked right.

This can’t be happening. Not to me. Not to someone who worries about this happening as an insurance against it happening.

They seemed to be taking too long to hit the water, given their rate of descent. Daniel rapped at his watch – 9.08am.

Let’s get this over with. I can’t stand this fear any more, this waiting, this living in fear of dying.

At this moment he realized that Hall and Oates were still playing on the sound system: ‘I Can’t Go For That (No Can Do)’.

The plane levelled out again, the wings dipping one way before correcting to the other. Daniel sat upright and saw they were within a few hundred feet of the water. The ocean was a deep, vivid blue, almost violet. A coral reef and dark shadows could be seen. It felt as though they were suspended. Time slowed down, distorted,
warped, expanded. The intensity of the moment was almost physical, almost too physically painful to bear. Daniel sensed he was living more in the tissue of each of these last seconds, these final heartbeats, than he had in all the frozen years of his life so far.

The plane trembled, dropped, pulled hard left.

We get through this together.

Continuous juddering now. Sporadic screaming. An overhead locker flopped open. Bags of peanuts flew around the cabin. Nancy was clenching her teeth. Her eyes were bulging. She made the sign of the cross. Snatches of the pilot and co-pilot going through a checklist could be heard: ‘Right condition. Lever right. Condition. Lever.’ They were talking in English, the international language of air traffic control. It sounded like an abstract poem. ‘We out at one zero. Angel. Repeat. We out at angel.’ Beeps and synthesized warning voices could be heard as well. A metallic voice confirmed: ‘Altitude one zero. Altitude angel. ‘There was another clatter, a howl of wind, and abruptly it felt as if the air had been sucked out of the cabin. The emergency door across the aisle had opened and the flight attendant had disappeared.

The pilot’s voice came over the intercom: ‘
Brace! Brace!
’

Noticing a tingling sensation in his urethra, Daniel looked down and became mesmerized by a creeping dark patch around the crotch of his shorts. The image of his father’s face flashed in his head again. The smell of Mint Imperials. The plane slewed left and right. It was soundless. Powerless. They were no longer at an angle to the horizon.

Silver shards of glass silently filled the air. The left wing clipped the surface of the water and the plane started its violent cartwheel. This, Daniel thought, is it.

THE ICE RINK IN FRONT OF THE TEMPERATE HOUSE AT KEW WAS, TO
Martha, a sanctuary. When she skated here she could forget about insulin, about her condition, about what made her different from the other girls. With each graceful sweep of her blades she was able to slough it all off. From the moment her parents had driven away to Heathrow two days earlier, she had been lobbying her grandparents to bring her here. Though they always found the botanical gardens too crowded on a Saturday, and resented having to pay for the skating on top of their senior citizen’s admission fee, they could hardly refuse. It was a short distance from their house. But they did qualify their capitulation: they couldn’t stay long. They were worried that Martha’s blood sugar levels would drop if she exerted herself too much in the biting cold. The weather forecast that morning had predicted that this would be one of the coldest November days on record, with temperatures dipping as low as -15 in parts of the north. Even London was expected to be -10 by late afternoon, colder than Moscow. It was afternoon now.

As Amanda strode off to the cafeteria for two glasses of mulled wine and a mug of hot chocolate, Philip watched his granddaughter describe lazy figures of eight in the ice. Though she was easy to spot in her pink, fur-lined coat, a freezing fog was descending and every time she disappeared behind other skaters at the far side of the rink, Philip’s eyes watered as he strained to see her. His breath was mushrooming visibly in front of him and, though he was
wearing a Russian Ushanka with the flaps down, and an Aran sweater under a padded wax jacket, the wind chill was reaching his bones. To try to warm up, he stamped his feet and clapped his hands. Beside him was a
Finding Nemo
rucksack he was looking after for Martha. Because it was on his deaf side, he could not hear the mobile ringing inside it.

When Martha scraped to a halt in front of him, sending up a spray of ice, he tried not to show he was shivering. Amanda returned and handed Martha the hot chocolate. The child cupped it in her hands for a few seconds before taking a sip. As it was too hot to drink, she handed it back and, after asking her grandparents to watch, began to spin, bringing in her arms to turn faster, obeying the laws of physics as explained to her by her father. After thirty seconds she slowed down and, with a wobble and a backward glance, set off on another lap, her skates hissing as they bit. When she had not reappeared after a minute, Philip became anxious. He checked his watch. Her next injection was due in half an hour. He began walking stiffly to the other end of the rink. Another skater, he could see, was trying to help Martha to her feet, but she was limp in his arms. Two rink marshals in jesters’ hats appeared and carried her towards the pavilion. By the time Philip was able to shoulder his way in, a small crowd had formed. Martha was having convulsions. ‘She’s with me,’ he said. ‘She’s diabetic.’ He tipped the contents of the rucksack on to the floor, saw some glucose tablets underneath Martha’s velvety toy turtle and put one on her tongue. Her undulations slowed and stopped. Philip held her mouth closed as the tablet dissolved. Flecks of saliva, he could see, had caught on her chapped lips. He pressed two fingers against her wrist and found the thread of her pulse. After a minute her eyes opened. They were dilated but she was soon able to focus them. ‘Did I have another hypo, Grampy?’ she asked blearily. Bubbles of saliva were appearing in the corner of her mouth.

Philip nodded and gave her a reassuring smile. He found her medical pouch among the scattered items on the floor and deftly administered a dose of insulin. Amanda joined them and gathered up the rest of the contents of the rucksack. The mobile was ringing
again. One of the marshals, a man with windburnt cheeks and a pierced tongue, lifted Martha up and led the way to a small first aid room, backing against its swing door to open it. The bells on his hat jingled as he laid her down on a narrow stretcher bed. This made her grin. Amanda looked at the message on the screen of Martha’s iPhone, touched it and held it to her ear. A look of confusion crossed her face. She tapped the message again, held the mobile to Philip’s good ear and said. ‘Listen to this. The message says it’s from Nancy, but I can’t make out what she’s saying.’